I'm a libertarian lawyer and college professor. I blog on religion, history, constitutional law, government policy, philosophy, sexuality, and the American Founding. Everything is fair game though. Over the years, I've been involved in numerous group blogs that come and go. This blog archives almost everything I write.
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Wednesday, July 06, 2016

Fea: "Review of Eric Metaxas, 'If You Can Keep It': Part 2

First, the founders did believe that religious people made
good citizens because they knew how to sacrifice their own interests for
something greater, namely their god. But the founders did not believe
that religion, or particularly Christianity, was the only
source of virtue. Metaxas is wrong when he says that “virtue and
morality divorced from religion was unthinkable” to the founders (p.60).
Most of the founders, including John Witherspoon, the evangelical
Presbyterian clergyman who was the only minister who signed the
Declaration of Independence, believed that virtue could stem from the
conscience or the “moral sense.” Granted, many of them–whether
Christian, Deist, or something in-between–believed that the conscience
or moral sense was instilled in human beings by God, but they did not
believe that a religious experience, the practice of a a specific faith,
or the imbibing of particular religious doctrines was necessary to live
a virtuous life.

....

On p.66. Metaxas states that the “religion” that the founders thought
was inseparable to a virtuous republic was not the religion of the
“clockmaker God of Deist imagination,” but the religion of the Bible.
(He quotes the Massachusetts statesman Daniel Webster on the importance
of the Bible in creating citizens). Metaxas implies that “Deism” was not
a religion that the founders thought could contribute to a virtuous
republic because it did not adhere to the teachings of the Bible. But
while Deists did not believe that the Bible was inspired, they did
believe that the ethical teachings of the Bible could serve as a
guide–one of several–to a virtuous life. In other words, Deism was
certainly one of the so-called “religious” beliefs that the founders
believed could contribute to the greater good of the republic.

Three thoughts from me:

1. Yes it's true that America's Founders thought that non-religious people could live the life of virtue necessary to sustain a republic, but thought such people tended to be rare; thus a "religious" citizenry would be preferred to a non-religious one.

2. Yes it's true that when America's Founders invoked "religion" necessary to sustain republics, they didn't necessarily mean "Christianity" of any kind (orthodox, unorthodox, deistic). Rather they believed a generally deistic or theistic minimum of the existence of a divine Providence and future state of rewards and punishments necessary. Hence the generic monotheism of America' Declaration of Independence.

Such could be found in Judaism, Islam, the various sects of "Christianity" (orthodox or not), pagan religions like Hinduism and Greco-Romanism and even non-Christian cold Deism (an absentee landlord God could, theoretically, so perfectly and tightly wind up His natural law clock, embedded in the release of which would reward virtue and punish vice both in this world and beyond).

3. Even though virtually all religions, Christian and non, were "valid" in this sense, Christianity still had the comparative advantage of containing Jesus' explicit moral teachings which were like shortcuts ordinary people who didn't have as George Washington put it, "the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure," to a perfected morality, the only thing about "religion" which civil republics were to be concerned. (Post John Locke government would no longer be in the business of "soulcraft," or caring about which religions could save men's souls.)